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“Do I have to touch it?” my friend Kalpna asks. You’re going to cook it, I tell her. You too, I tell Galit, at the beginning of our cooking lesson.

I was at the beach with Kalpna, and we were sharing a veal sandwich, when she confessed that she wanted to eat out less but didn’t know how to cook a piece of meat. At a party, Galit said she wasn’t ready for home ownership, not before learning to cook a piece of fish.

These are both smart professionals who do all sorts of things I can’t. Kalpna Patel is a crafter and designs store windows. I can’t darn a sock. Galit Rodan is a photojournalist. I don’t know how to set my camera’s white balance.

And while vegetables are a good first cooking lesson for most people, I understand that proteins are scarier.

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I get it. We’re afraid of meat. It’s wet and sticky. Supermarket meat comes in shrink-wrapped packages, portioned into right-angled shapes. We’re taught to handle it like it’s radioactive, as dangerous to cook as meth. And while precautions have to be taken with chicken, which often carries salmonella, we can safely mess around with a good piece of beef, lamb, pork, fish or tofu, procured from a trustworthy source.

Kalpna Patel slices the beef that she has just cooked according to Corey Mintz's instructions. (David Cooper / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

Chicken sliced on the cutting board after being cooked to a safe internal temperature. (David Cooper / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

Corey Mintz presses the salmon to determine if it has been sufficiently cooked inside. (David Cooper / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

I start by steaming a piece of the fish so they can see how the flesh changes as it cooks, going from bright orange to pink. Every couple minutes I make them poke it with their fingers, partly to see how the flesh changes as it cooks — the fish is structured sort of like plate mail armour, and the plates begin to separate as they heat through —and partly to get over their fear of touching it.

The only way this protein cooking lesson is going to work is if I get Kalpna and Galit to relax about getting their hands dirty, with minimal interference from me.

When I tell Kalpna that we won’t be using a timer to cook our food, she looks betrayed. Instead we’re using salt, heat and observation. If you depend on a recipe that tells you to cook a piece of meat for eight minutes, how do you know your meat is the same density as the one the recipe tester used, that your oven distributes heat the same? You have to learn to trust your senses. Imagine driving with your eyes closed, depending only on your GPS, the voice telling you, “in 100 metres, turn right,” without using your eyes to see when to make the turn, if any other cars are coming.

Stop leaning on cooking times. They’re estimates. We can only learn to cook these things when we start to trust our sense of smell, touch and taste.

Buried in Harold McGee’s dense tome of food chemistry, On Food and Cooking, is the most simple and helpful explanation: “The trick in frying is to prevent the outside from overcooking before the inside is done.”

That’s why we take meat out of the fridge in advance of cooking. Starting from cold, it takes longer for the heat to penetrate the centre, so the outside is going to overcook.

After the steaming I demonstrate pan roasting (starting in a pan, to achieve crispness and colour, finishing in the oven where the surrounding heat will cook it more evenly) and then Kalpna and Galit roll up their sleeves and cook salmon, steak and chicken, fearful at first, their arms extended to stand as far from the meat as possible.

They cook each piece using the same method, looking for the same signs, which I will produce here as a list, rather than the usual formatting of a recipe (e.g. “cook until browned, about 7 minutes”).

1. Poke the meat. Try to remember how it feels when it’s raw.

2. Heat an ovenproof pan to medium-high and the oven to 425F/220C.

3. Sprinkle the meat with coarse salt.

4. Pour some oil in the pan: vegetable, grapeseed, peanut, rendered animal fat (chicken, beef, pork). Anything but olive or sesame oil, which have low smoking points and will burn at this heat.

5. For fish, slice a few slits into the skin side to prevent buckling. Lay the meat flat in the pan and do not move it around. Watch as the edges begin to colour. Lean in to really see it. Every protein, including tofu, connects with hot metal the same as Spider-Man’s webs. It quickly forms a bond that will tear if pulled. But leave it for a minute and it releases from the metal. When that happens, lift it up with tongs to peek at how the colour and crust are coming along, moving it around the pan so its surface is coming in maximum contact with the heat. When it gets coppery-coloured turn it over. Do the same on the other side and then slide it into the oven.

6a. Keep poking it every couple minutes. You’ll feel how the texture tightens as it cooks. The first time you do this, you will not think you’re learning anything. But when you cut into the meat and see if it’s rare, medium or well done, it will connect with your stored memory of the meat’s firmness. Do this a few more times and you’ll start to trust your senses.

7. When practising, don’t be afraid to slice into a piece of meat. You’ll learn more by linking your sense of touch with what you see on the inside.

8. When it’s ready, rest meat on a cutting board for a few minutes. It will retain more juiciness when sliced.

9. Do it again and again. When you learn to cook a good, flavourful piece of meat or fish from a trustworthy source, you’ll stop overcooking it and no longer need blobs of sauce (loaded with salt and sugar) to cover up the lack of taste.

Later I email them with the bonus message that you can cook meat and vegetables in the same pan (so long as you don’t overcrowd it). A confident Galit sends back a photo of salmon and brussels sprouts and tells me, “I just did this.” I am overjoyed.

Our culture sends us the conflicting messages that we don’t have time to cook but that we’re dumb for not knowing how to cook. School doesn’t teach us and corporations do their best to sell us a lifestyle of convenience foods that don’t require understanding of how they work. Meanwhile, we are increasingly fetishistic about food, made to feel foolish, or that we’re bad parents, if we can’t effortlessly conjure nutritious meals based on a stroll through the market.

Never feel dumb for not knowing how to cook something. Just put up your hand and ask.

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